This forum will offer a roundtable-style discussion considering what an “inter-imperial” model brings to analyses of world history and politics. How does this model complement, challenge, or reconfigure other models (comparative, connected, postcolonial, world-system) within the multi-vectored field of empires? What emerges when considering the discursive-material legacies of successive empires as co-constituted with the sustaining, resisting practices of conscripted peoples? How have aesthetic and knowledge formations interacted with political-economic formations to enable justice-seeking transformation–as well as imperial interpellation?
For thoughts on these questions and more, join scholars Laura Doyle (University of Massachusetts-Amherst), Hayrettin Yücesoy (Washington University-St. Louis), and Jessica Wang (University of British Columbia) on November 18 as they continue a line of thought developed in their roundtable discussion from the 2021 WHA Annual Meeting.
Laura Doyle is Professor of English at UMass Amherst, where she arrived in 1995 after seven years as Assistant Professor at Harvard University. In the Fall of 2010, as Leverhulme Research Professor in residence at the University of Exeter (UK), she presented Leverhulme lectures throughout Britain and Ireland. Doyle’s latest book, Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labors, and the Literary Arts of Alliance (Duke UP 2020), has been awarded the Immanuel Wallerstein prize from the American Sociological Association. At UMass, Doyle is co-organizer of the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project, which fosters interdisciplinary work in global and postcolonial studies, with a strong historical focus.
Hayrettin Yücesoy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, at Washington University in St. Louis. His work focuses on the history of the Middle East. His research fields and interests include the history of the caliphate, Abbasid political thought and practice, historiography, and political messianism. He is the author of Messianic Beliefs and Imperial Politics in Medieval Islam: The Abbasid Caliphate in the Early Ninth Century and Taṭawwur al-Fikr al-Siyasī ‘inda Ahl al-Sunna: Fatrat al-Takwīn: min Bidāyatihi ḥatta al-Thulth al-Awwal min al-Qarn al-Rābiʿ al-Hijrī [The Development of Sunni Political Thought: The Formative Period (circa. 8th – 10th centuries)]. He has also been published in multiple professional journals such as the Journal of World History and the Journal of Global History.
Jessica Wang is Professor of U.S. History and Co-Chair of the International Relations Program at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (1999) and Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840-1920 (2019), along with a range of essays related to the social and political contexts of knowledge and governance. Her current research focuses on tropical agriculture, inter-imperial collaboration, and the U.S. insular empire in the early twentieth century.